Startups List

DecagonH-1B

decagon.ai ↗

AI customer support: $1.5B in June 2025 → $4.5B in January 2026 (roughly 7 months). The best-proven ROI but the priciest valuation; the ~128x is based on private/third-party revenue estimates, so treat it as directional only. Has completed an employee tender offer (a plus); Sierra remains one of the strongest competitors.

LangchainH-1B

langchain.com ↗

Best known for the LangChain open-source framework; monetization runs mainly through LangSmith observability/evals. $1.25B valuation in October 2025. The ~$12-16M ARR is a third-party estimate, not an official disclosure — so the multiple looks steep but shouldn't be read precisely. Strong mindshare, but squeezed from both sides by model providers and platforms.

Linear

linear.app ↗

$1.25B valuation / $82M Series C supported; the ~$100M ARR is only a third-party estimate — the official signals are 280% profit growth and 15K+ customers. If the ARR estimate is close, the multiple is around 12.5x. Remote since day one with a strong craft culture; a mecca for design and frontend people.

VercelH-1B

vercel.com ↗

The company behind Next.js/v0: $340M GAAP revenue run-rate, +84%, $9.3B valuation; has already run an employee tender of roughly $300M. IPO-readiness has been reported, but "closest to IPO" is a subjective call. Still a strong option on a risk-adjusted basis; AI agent deployment/v0 is the main growth narrative.

OpenRouter

openrouter.ai ↗

A routing layer across 400+ models, with a take rate around 5%, 25T tokens per week, and 8M+ developers. The 50x revenue growth in 18 months isn't strongly confirmed from public sources — treat as directional. The best industry-wide vantage point in the stack; in July 2026, WSJ/Axios reported Stripe talks around ~$10B, not yet final.

Parallel web systemsH-1B

parallel.ai ↗

Founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal — web search/research APIs built for agents. $740M in November 2025 → $2B in April 2026 (roughly 5 months). Talent density is the biggest draw; the biggest risk is model providers internalizing search/browsing capabilities.

Composio

composio.dev ↗

Still the one on this list that most needs your own diligence. An agent tool-integration layer with $29M total funding ($25M Series A in 2025 + seed); no new priced round since the A. Risks: squeezed between model providers, Zapier, and the MCP standard, plus an April 2026 API/webhook outage and a May security incident — press hard on reliability and security.

Resolve AIH-1B

resolve.ai ↗

AI SRE — public/company sources show 16 months from stealth to a $1B valuation (not $1.5B). The founders co-created OpenTelemetry, and team quality is the biggest selling point; customers include Coinbase and Salesforce, but the AI SRE category still isn't fully proven.

Harvey AIH-1B

harvey.ai ↗

One of the best-known vertical AI companies and the legal AI leader. $11B valuation as of March 2026; third-party estimates put ARR around ~$300M. Competition from Legora is very real (~$5.6B valuation in 2026 / ~$100M ARR estimates), and watch the risk of model providers building legal tooling directly.

VantaH-1B

vanta.com ↗

An underrated one: $300M ARR, +69%, about 14x on the last round's $4.15B, with customer growth accelerating four quarters straight. Shadow AI unexpectedly became a growth engine. Remote-first isn't confirmed from authoritative public sources — verify remote policy, team distribution, and promotion/sales efficiency during interviews.

GleanH-1B

glean.com ↗

$300M ARR, +89% — about 24x at the $7.2B valuation, relatively reasonable for a growth name. The enterprise sales environment looks healthy, but the $100K-5M deal sizes aren't confirmed from public sources — verify through interviews or internal channels. The core variable is whether it can hold off Microsoft Copilot/Google/enterprise search pressure.

RampH-1B

ramp.com ↗

The most solid fundamentals on the list: >$1B annualized revenue (media cites ~$1.5B run-rate), positive free cash flow, a $44B valuation in 2026, a clear IPO path, and a management team not inclined to sell. NYC headquarters. Lowest risk, but relatively capped upside too.

Turbopuffer

turbopuffer.com ↗

The most counterintuitive one on the list: ~20-22 people, <$1M in primary funding, ~$100M ARR (a third-party/CEO-reported estimate, not audited financials). Public customer signals include Cursor/Notion/Linear/Legora; the Anthropic mention comes from a third-party citation. Huge equity upside potential, but verify the equity terms, liquidity, and hiring bar.

Wispr FlowH-1B

wisprflow.ai ↗

A breakout hit in voice dictation. The 50% MoM user growth is from an old June 2025 report; the fresher signal is a 2026 job post claiming revenue +150% QoQ over the past 4 quarters. The $700M valuation from November 2025 is supported; the ~$2B valuation/round has mixed confirmation (talks/rumor vs a Forge mark). Strong product experience, but heavy Apple/Google/Microsoft platform risk.

SupabaseH-1B · past

supabase.com ↗

One of the biggest beneficiaries of vibe coding: $10.5B post-money in June 2026, roughly double the October 2025 mark. Fully remote with no location-based pay — a top pick for anyone outside the US. Public WLB signals aren't bad, but intensity, async culture, and on-call should be confirmed through interviews and reference calls.

Fireworks AI

fireworks.ai ↗

The dark horse of inference infra: $4B in October 2025 → $17.5B in July 2026 (roughly 9 months); annualized revenue run rate >$1B, 5x YoY. The core bet is that enterprises keep using private data and dedicated models; still worth diligencing durability, margins, and large-customer concentration.

Town

town.com ↗

Earliest stage here, and fresh off a pivot: from small-business tax → a general/personal AI assistant, with a16z leading a $55M Series A. Founding team: former Plaid CTO Jean-Denis Greze plus ex-Google/Dropbox product/design leader Tony Vincent. The new direction goes head-to-head with the giants; execution and distribution are the core risks.

RipplingH-1B

rippling.com ↗

A unified HR+IT+finance platform: $1B ARR, +78%; latest primary valuation $16.8B. Secondary-market discount signals are noisy (implied valuations vary widely across sources) — when negotiating an offer, nail down the strike price, 409A/current FMV, and liquidity policy; the high-intensity culture/WLB risk still deserves a hard look.

LlamaIndexH-1B

llamaindex.ai ↗

Positioned more narrowly than LangChain, focused on document AI / agentic parsing / OCR. The ~$93M valuation is a third-party estimate, not an official post-money. No new priced round since March 2025, but there are Databricks/KPMG strategic minority investments and an AWS accelerator. Core risk: frontier multimodal models commoditizing parsing.

Netic AIinsider

netic.ai ↗

A B2B company building an AI revenue engine for essential services — plumbing, roofing, HVAC, electricians. Publicly verifiable: $23M Series B in November 2025, ~$450M valuation, ~$43M in cumulative funding; Founders Fund participated in or led three consecutive early rounds; hiring spans eng/product/GTM/ops. Caveats: the ~$20M ARR / ~22x is company-reported or internal figures, not independently verified publicly; founding dates vary slightly across sources; ServiceTitan currently looks more like an integration/ecosystem partner, plus a long-term platform risk.

CrusoeinsiderH-1B

crusoe.ai ↗

The only asset-heavy infrastructure company on the list: it builds AI data centers — the Abilene campus for OpenAI's Stargate is its work. Revenue $276M → $1B → a projected $2B, with a rumored $30B pre-IPO round. Denver headquarters. In an asset-heavy model, high leverage and customer concentration are the things to watch.

Anthropic

anthropic.com ↗

Maker of the Claude model family, positioned around AI safety and controllability. Run-rate revenue jumped from roughly $1B in early 2025 to over $5B by August 2025, while valuation leapt from $61.5B (Mar 2025) to $183B post-money (Sep 2025) over the same stretch — remarkable growth, but the valuation now hinges on continued revenue doubling.

Black Forest Labs

blackforestlabs.ai ↗

Founded by the original Stable Diffusion research team, Black Forest Labs built rapid credibility with its FLUX.1 image-generation model suite. From a $31M seed to a $3.25B post-money Series B about 14 months later, with Adobe, Canva and Figma among the investors — signaling it has become embedded infrastructure for several design/image tools, though that also raises customer-concentration and platform-dependency risk.

Chainguard

chainguard.dev ↗

Chainguard secures open-source software supply chains via vulnerability-free container images and build provenance, founded by ex-Google open-source security engineers. Valuation jumped from $1.1B to $3.5B within a year while ARR grew 7x to $40M — growth is real but valuation is running ahead of revenue.

Figure

figure.ai ↗

General-purpose humanoid robot maker aiming to deploy robots in factories and eventually homes. Valuation jumped 15x in 19 months, from $2.6B at Series B to $39B at Series C — an unusually steep climb for a pre-revenue hardware company.

Anduril

anduril.com ↗

Defense-tech unicorn: valuation jumped from $14B (Aug 2024 Series F) to $61B (May 2026 Series H) in under two years, with 2025 revenue doubling to $2.2B. Key risk is valuation outrunning revenue growth plus heavy dependence on U.S. military contracts (it inherited Microsoft's $22B Army AR/VR headset deal).

Bedrock Robotics

bedrockrobotics.com ↗

Bedrock retrofits existing construction equipment (starting with excavators) with autonomy using lidar, GPS and motion sensors. It emerged from stealth in July 2025 with $80M seed+Series A, then closed a $270M Series B in Feb 2026 at a $1.75B valuation just seven months later — backers include NVIDIA's NVentures, MIT, and real-estate giant Tishman Speyer, signaling strong conviction in construction-site autonomy.

Granola

granola.ai ↗

Granola is an AI meeting-notes app pivoting from a consumer notetaker into an enterprise AI platform, with customers including Vanta, Gusto, Asana, and Cursor. Valuation jumped from $250M to $1.5B in about 10 months (May 2025 to March 2026), reflecting fast growth but also high expectations riding on its enterprise pivot.

Deel

deel.com ↗

Deel offers a one-stop platform for global hiring, payroll, and compliance across 80+ countries. The company has been profitable for three straight years and crossed $1B ARR in 2025 with its first $100M revenue month, with valuation rising from $5.5B (2021 Series D) to $17.3B (2025 Series E); however it was also embroiled in a corporate espionage/trade-secrets dispute with rival Rippling in 2025, creating reputational and legal exposure.

Etched

etched.com ↗

Etched builds Sohu, an ASIC that only runs transformer-architecture models, betting the dominant AI architecture won't shift. Its valuation climbed from $5B (Dec 2025) to $10.3B (Jul 2026) to $21B (Aug 2026) in about eight months, an unusually fast re-rating for a hardware startup that still needs to prove manufacturing scale.

Fal

fal.ai ↗

fal is a developer-facing inference platform for generative media (image, video, audio), competing on raw speed. It raised three rounds in 2025 alone (B, C, D), with valuation rocketing to $4.5B as reported revenue passed $200M — an unusually steep trajectory. Key risks: valuation may be outrunning fundamentals, and the business depends heavily on upstream model providers and GPU supply.

Hex

hex.tech ↗

Hex is a collaborative analytics and data science workspace (notebook + BI) used by Reddit, HubSpot, Figma, and Anthropic among others. It went from a $52M Series B led by a16z in 2022 to a $70M Series C led by Avra Capital in 2025 at a $400M valuation, bringing total funding to $172M; a key risk is that cloud data platforms like Snowflake and Databricks are both investors and potential competitors.

Lambda

lambda.ai ↗

Lambda is a GPU cloud provider focused on AI training/inference, branding itself the "superintelligence cloud." It raised a $480M Series D in Feb 2025 at ~$2.5B valuation, then over $1.5B in a Series E in Nov 2025 led by TWG Global, with valuation chatter reaching $5-6B — more than doubling in nine months. Key risks are Nvidia GPU supply dependence and intense neocloud competition (CoreWeave, Crusoe, etc.).

ClickHouse

clickhouse.com ↗

ClickHouse is the commercialized entity behind the open-source columnar database born at Yandex, now a de facto standard for real-time analytics; its 2025 Series C and extension pushed valuation to $6.35B with backing from Khosla, Index, Coatue and others. Key risks are converting open-source/community users into paid Cloud revenue, and encroachment from Snowflake, Databricks and other incumbents expanding into real-time analytics.

Cursor

cursor.com ↗

Cursor (parent Anysphere) makes an AI-native code editor that scaled from $0 to ~$2B ARR in three years, one of the fastest B2B ramps on record, hitting a $29.3B valuation in its Nov 2025 Series D and reportedly in talks for a $50B round in mid-2026. The growth curve is extraordinary but so is the valuation expansion, and the business remains heavily dependent on third-party LLM providers for its core product.

OpenAI

openai.com ↗

OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, is the highest-profile general AI lab, with valuation rocketing from $300B (Apr 2025) to $500B (employee tender, Oct 2025) to $852B post-money on a record $122B raise (Mar 2026). The growth trajectory is extraordinary, but so is the gap between valuation and current revenue, plus enormous committed compute/data-center spend.

Periodic Labs

periodiclabs.com ↗

Periodic Labs pairs AI models with autonomous labs to automate the scientific method end-to-end, with discovering a high-temperature superconductor as its north star. It launched in Sept 2025 with a $300M seed at a $1.3B valuation and just six months later is in talks to raise $500M+ at a $7-7.5B valuation, nearly a 6x jump — one of the hottest AI4Science bets right now.

Prime Intellect

primeintellect.ai ↗

Prime Intellect offers distributed compute, an RL framework, and eval tools so enterprises can build their own AI agents without depending on frontier labs. It raised a $130M Series A in July 2026 at a $1B valuation, reaching over $100M ARR and 6,000+ customers in under a year — striking growth, but the model leans heavily on GPU supply and open-source ecosystem dynamics amid stiff competition.

Reflection AI

reflection.ai ↗

Founded by DeepMind's Gemini reward-modeling lead and AlphaGo co-creator, building the Asimov autonomous coding agent and open frontier models. Valuation rocketed from $545M to $8B in 7 months (15x) with Nvidia and Sequoia backing, but commercialization is early — the flagship model doesn't ship until early 2026.

Runway

runwayml.com ↗

Runway pioneered AI video generation and is now betting on broader 'world models.' Valuation nearly doubled in 10 months, from $3B (Apr 2025) to $5.3B (Feb 2026), with General Atlantic leading both rounds and Nvidia, Adobe Ventures and AMD Ventures among strategic backers — but competition from OpenAI's Sora and Google's Veo keeps the moat unproven.

Saronic

saronic.com ↗

Saronic builds autonomous surface vessels (USVs) for U.S. Navy and maritime security customers, with valuation jumping from $4B to $9.25B in about 13 months. Key risk is dependence on defense procurement cycles and whether its Port Alpha shipyard scale-up delivers on schedule.

Sierra

sierra.ai ↗

Sierra builds enterprise AI customer service agents (chat and voice) that handle returns, subscription changes, and support tickets. Valuation jumped from $4.5B (Oct 2024) to $10B (Sep 2025) to $15.8B (May 2026) in about 18 months, and it hit $100M ARR just seven quarters after launch — one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies ever, though the valuation is pricing in a lot of future growth.

Modal

modal.com ↗

Modal lets developers run GPU/CPU workloads via plain Python without managing infra. Annualized revenue jumped 5x from $60M (Sep 2025) to over $300M (May 2026), and valuation followed from $1.1B to $4.65B in the same stretch — a striking growth rate, but the valuation expansion is just as aggressive.

Together

together.ai ↗

Together AI runs an inference/training cloud for open-source and enterprise AI workloads, focused on GPU acceleration. Valuation jumped from $3.3B (Series B, early 2025) to $8.3B (July 2026), with annual bookings above $1.15B and customers like Cursor, Cognition, and Decagon. Key risk: heavy dependence on Nvidia GPU supply and intense pricing competition from larger clouds.

World Labs

worldlabs.ai ↗

Fei-Fei Li's spatial intelligence startup builds 'world models' that perceive, generate, and interact with 3D environments; its first product Marble generates persistent 3D scenes from images or text. Valuation rocketed from a $200M founding mark to talks around $5B within about 18 months on $1.23B+ raised, an infra-scale bet whose commercialization beyond Marble is still unproven.

Pierre Computer

pierre.co ↗

Pierre builds "low-level, composable product infrastructure for machine work," currently shipping Code Storage as an opinionated, rebuilt Git platform. The founding team has strong pedigree (Bootstrap co-creator, Twitter's first intern), but public funding disclosures are sparse and inconsistent across sources, leaving round details and valuation unclear.

Polymarket

polymarket.com ↗

Crypto-native prediction market where users bet on political, economic and sports outcomes. Valuation rocketed from an October 2025 climb to $15B (April 2026, with ICE investing $600M) to a reported $21B round led by 1789 Capital by September 2026, with annualized revenue over $1.2B — but regulatory classification and platform/liquidity dependence remain open risks.

PostHog

posthog.com ↗

PostHog builds an open-source product analytics and dev-tools suite (analytics, session replay, feature flags, A/B testing) aimed at engineers who want to self-host rather than rely on third-party SaaS. Valuation jumped from $920M (Series D, June 2025) to $1.4B (Series E, September 2025) in just three months, officially crossing into unicorn territory, with 500,000+ teams now using its products. Risk: two rounds and a fast valuation climb in quick succession raise the question of whether monetiz

Stripe

stripe.com ↗

Stripe is one of the world's largest payments infrastructure companies, with roughly $5.12B net revenue in 2024 and $1.9T in total payment volume (up 34% YoY). Its valuation has swung sharply: down to $50B in 2023, back to $65B via a February 2024 employee tender offer, $91.5B in February 2025, and a record $159B in a February 2026 tender offer. A key risk is that valuation now trades at a rich multiple of revenue and liquidity keeps coming from repeated tender offers rather than an IPO.

Temporal

temporal.io ↗

Temporal provides a durable execution engine that keeps long-running distributed workflows and AI agents reliable and resumable. Valuation jumped from $1.5B (flat Series B in 2023) to $5B by February 2026, driven by demand for agentic AI infrastructure. Key risks are valuation expansion outrunning revenue proof, and a thin two-person founding team.

Revolut

revolut.com ↗

Revolut is a UK-based digital banking super-app offering multi-currency accounts, crypto trading, and card services. Valuation climbed from $33B (2021) to $75B (Nov 2025), nearly doubling in 15 months mostly via employee/secondary share sales rather than a fresh primary round. Key risk: valuation is largely secondary-market driven, and full US banking rollout is still pending.

Safe Superintelligence

ssi.inc ↗

Founded by ex-OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever with a single stated mission: build safe superintelligence, with no interim product roadmap. Valuation climbed from roughly $5B at the Sept 2024 seed to $32B by mid-2025 (holding through Nvidia's $5B strategic investment in July 2026), on roughly $8B raised total — yet the company has shipped no product, has no revenue, and employs only about 50 people, making it one of the starkest valuation-to-output gaps in AI today.

Shield AI

shield.ai ↗

Shield AI builds Hivemind, autonomy software for military drones and aircraft; valuation jumped from $5.3B to $12.7B in about a year (+140%), driven by a U.S. Air Force CCA program selection and the Aechelon flight-sim acquisition. Risk: valuation is running well ahead of proven recurring revenue, and the business is tightly coupled to defense procurement cycles and policy.

Skild

skild.ai ↗

Skild AI is building a general-purpose robotics foundation model ("Skild Brain") meant to run across diverse robot hardware. Valuation rocketed from Series A to $14B by its January 2026 Series C, with SoftBank leading twice — one of the most capital-favored embodied-AI startups, though real-world commercialization and reliability are still unproven.

SpaceX

spacex.com ↗

SpaceX builds reusable rockets, Starlink satellite internet, and crewed spaceflight, and is the world's most valuable private space company. Valuation climbed from $350B (Dec 2024 tender) to $800B (Dec 2025 tender) via periodic insider share sales, then it IPO'd on Nasdaq in June 2026 raising $75B at a $1.75T valuation. Key risks are heavy dependence on Elon Musk's personal profile and on government contracts (NASA, DoD), plus a post-IPO share price pullback from its first-day high.

Sunday Robotics

sunday.ai ↗

Sunday Robotics builds Memo, a home robot trained on real household chores captured via its wearable Skill Capture Glove, covering tasks like dishwashing, laundry folding and espresso pulling. It emerged from stealth in November 2025 and hit a $1.15B valuation on a $165M Series B just four months later, but the product is still hand-built (~$20K/unit) and unproven at scale.

Replit

replit.com ↗

Replit is a cloud IDE turned AI coding-agent platform ("vibe coding"), whose valuation jumped from $3B to $9B in about six months as annualized revenue reportedly surged from $2.8M to $150M+ in under a year. The growth is striking but comes with stretched-valuation risk and intense competition from Cursor, Lovable, and others.

Whatnot

whatnot.com ↗

Whatnot is the largest livestream shopping platform in the US, centered on auction-style sales of collectibles (Funko Pop, trading cards, sneakers). Valuation went from near-$5B (Jan 2025) to $11.5B (Oct 2025) to reported $20B talks (Aug 2026) in about a year, a striking pace that also raises the bar for future growth to justify.

WorkOS

workos.com ↗

WorkOS lets software companies bolt on SSO, SCIM, and permissions to become "enterprise-ready," essentially serving as the identity and compliance infrastructure layer for B2B SaaS. Its customer list is stacked with AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Perplexity, and it closed a $100M Series C in March 2026 at a $2B valuation. The valuation leans heavily on continued explosive growth among AI startups, a dependency that cuts both ways if AI funding cools.

Abridge

abridge.com ↗

Abridge builds AI-generated clinical documentation from doctor-patient conversations, the leading pure-play AI medical scribe: valuation went from $2.75B (Feb 2025 Series D) to $5.3B just four months later (Series E), then a $316M extension in April 2026 held valuation steady at $5.3B, now live in 250+ large health systems. Key risks are dependency on EHR platforms like Epic and intense competition from Microsoft/Nuance and well-funded rivals like Ambience.

Airwallex

airwallex.com ↗

Airwallex builds cross-border payments and business finance infrastructure, hitting $720M annualized revenue in March 2025 (+90% YoY), with valuation jumping from $6.2B (Series F, May) to $8B (Series G, December) within seven months. The growth is real, but the pace of valuation expansion is now outrunning typical SaaS multiples, worth watching in future rounds.

Applied Intuition

appliedintuition.com ↗

Applied Intuition builds the infrastructure layer for vehicle intelligence and simulation, with 18 of the top 20 global automakers and major U.S. DoD programs as customers. Valuation jumped from $6B to $15B in about 15 months, though the 2025 Series F included roughly $400M in secondary sales, suggesting early investors are cashing out ahead of a potential IPO.

Base Power

basepowercompany.com ↗

Base Power builds and owns home batteries, selling backup power as a subscription service to households in Texas and Illinois — effectively a new kind of utility. Valuation rocketed from $4B (Oct 2025) to $13B post (Aug 2026) in under a year, an unusually fast climb that raises questions about hardware scaling and regulatory exposure.

Thinking Machines

thinkingmachines.ai ↗

Founded by ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, the lab closed a $2B seed round in July 2025 at a $12B valuation (a16z-led, with Nvidia, AMD, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, Jane Street), and by November 2025 was reportedly in talks for a new round at ~$50B — over 4x in four months. Its products (Tinker, Inkling) are still early and unproven commercially, and key departures (Barret Zoph, Luke Metz returning to OpenAI in early 2026) highlight key-person/retention risk.

Baseten

baseten.co ↗

Baseten runs a hosted inference platform that takes AI models from training to production at scale. Valuation rocketed from $2.15B to reportedly $13B within about a year, with customers like Writer, Abridge, and Bland — but that valuation curve is a heavy bet on the 'inference gold rush' continuing.

Factory

factory.ai ↗

Factory builds AI coding agents ("Droids") for enterprise engineering teams, with model-agnostic switching between Claude, DeepSeek and others as its key differentiator. Valuation jumped from $300M (Sept 2025 Series B) to $1.5B in just 7 months (April 2026), with marquee customers like Morgan Stanley and EY, though the model-neutral positioning faces pressure from foundation-model vendors building their own coding agents.

Liquid AI

liquid.ai ↗

An MIT CSAIL spinout building Liquid Foundation Models on a liquid neural network architecture positioned as more compute- and memory-efficient than Transformers. Valuation jumped from seed to a $2.35B Series A within about a year, led by AMD Ventures — a strategic signal toward edge/embedded chip use cases. Key risk is that the LNN architecture still lacks the ecosystem validation Transformers enjoy.

Mercury

mercury.com ↗

Mercury offers unified banking for startups (accounts, cards, bill pay, invoicing, spend management), serving 300,000+ companies. Valuation jumped from $1.62B to $5.2B in 14 months, with $650M in annualized revenue and multiple consecutive quarters of GAAP profitability — a rare profitable fintech unicorn.

Physical Intelligence

physicalintelligence.company ↗

Building general-purpose foundation models to act as the "brain" for robots, aiming for LLM-like generality in physical tasks. Valuation rocketed from $400M at seed to $5.6B in about a year, and the company is reportedly in talks to raise $1B more at an $11B valuation—among the fastest markups in embodied AI.

Profound

tryprofound.com ↗

Profound helps brands monitor and optimize their visibility and citations across AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, serving over 10% of the Fortune 500 and 700+ enterprises. It went from seed to a $1B valuation in just 18 months, becoming the first GEO-platform unicorn — the standout is sheer velocity, though the category is new and heavily dependent on how AI platforms choose to crawl and cite content.

Surge AI

surgehq.ai ↗

Surge AI supplies human data labeling and RLHF infrastructure to frontier labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta; founded in 2020 by Edwin Chen, it stayed fully bootstrapped and crossed $1B+ in annualized revenue in 2024 with under 100 employees, reportedly the fastest company ever to do so. In 2025 it began its first external fundraise talks, with reported target valuations climbing from $15B to $25B, though no closed round terms have been publicly confirmed yet.

Clay

clay.com ↗

Clay is an AI-powered GTM (go-to-market) automation platform that aggregates 50+ data sources and AI agents to help sales and marketing teams research leads and personalize outreach. Valuation rocketed from $500M (June 2024) to $3.1B (August 2025), reportedly reaching $5B via a January 2026 tender, with marquee AI customers like OpenAI and Anthropic — fast growth but valuation is being bid up just as quickly.

Mistral AI

mistral.ai ↗

France's flagship frontier AI lab, positioning around open-weight models and European AI sovereignty as a counter to OpenAI/Anthropic. Valuation rocketed from roughly $2B in Dec 2023 to €11.7B (~$13.7B) after ASML's September 2025 lead investment, with 900+ employees. Key risk is whether commercialization and compute spend can keep pace with the valuation, and whether its differentiation holds against much larger US rivals.

Chai Discovery

chaidiscovery.com ↗

Builds AI foundation models for de novo antibody and molecule design, with Lilly, Pfizer and Novartis as paying customers. Valuation roughly tripled from $1.3B to $3.8B in about seven months, one of the steepest valuation trajectories in the AI-for-biology wave.

Basis

usebasis.co ↗

Basis builds end-to-end AI agents for accounting firms across bookkeeping, tax, and audit workflows, already used by roughly 30% of the top 25 accounting firms. Valuation jumped to $1.15B at its Feb 2026 Series B just ~2-3 years after founding, with Khosla and Accel doubling down — a strong signal for vertical agents, though customer concentration among large firms and intensifying competition in AI-for-accounting are real risks.

Applied Compute

appliedcompute.com ↗

Founded by three ex-OpenAI researchers (o1, Codex alumni) who use reinforcement learning to help enterprises like DoorDash customize models and deploy autonomous agents. Valuation trajectory is extreme: ~$100M in May 2025, ~$500M by September, $1.3B talks by January 2026, and $3.25B talks by September 2026 — over 30x in 14 months, one of the steepest valuation curves in the current AI infra wave.

Cognition

cognition.ai ↗

Cognition builds Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer, and its valuation has exploded since acquiring Windsurf in July 2025: $10.2B in September, then a $1B raise pushing it to $25B pre-money, and reportedly toward $47B just three months later, with annualized revenue said to be nearing $1B. Growth is real but the valuation is compounding faster than typical SaaS benchmarks, so durable retention is the thing to watch.

Cyera

cyera.io ↗

Cyera builds data security posture management (DSPM) tools to discover, classify and protect sensitive data across cloud and AI workloads. Valuation has climbed fast: $1.4B (Apr 2024 Series C) to $3B (Nov 2024 Series D) to $6B (Jun 2025 Series E) to $9B (Jan 2026 Series F) — roughly 6x in under two years. Key risk is whether growth can keep justifying repeated valuation doublings, in a crowded DSPM/data-security field (Varonis, BigID, Wiz).

Databricks

databricks.com ↗

Databricks runs an enterprise data + AI lakehouse platform born out of UC Berkeley's Apache Spark project. Its valuation has climbed fast: Series K at $100B+ in August 2025, up to $134B by December 2025, and reports of a new round near $188B in 2026. The risk is deep dependence on enterprises committing to migrate their full data stack onto the platform, which cloud-native competitors could erode over time.

ElevenLabs

elevenlabs.io ↗

ElevenLabs builds AI voice synthesis and dubbing tech; valuation jumped from $3.3B to $11B in about a year, with Nvidia and Sequoia both backing recent rounds — one of the fastest markups in this cycle. Main risks are valuation running well ahead of disclosed revenue, and direct competition from OpenAI and Google in voice AI.

CoreWeave

coreweave.com ↗

CoreWeave pivoted from crypto mining to an Nvidia-GPU AI cloud provider, hitting $1.9B revenue in 2024 (up 730% YoY) and IPO'ing in March 2025 at a $23B valuation, raising $1.5B. Its biggest risk is customer concentration — Microsoft alone is roughly two-thirds of revenue, top two customers 77% — while the company remains deeply unprofitable ($863M net loss in 2024).

Kalshi

kalshi.com ↗

A CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange letting users trade on outcomes like elections, economic data, and sports. Valuation rocketed from $2B in June 2025 to $11B by December, a 5x+ jump in about six months, making it one of 2025's fastest-growing fintechs; the core risk is its ongoing legal fight with state gambling regulators and the CFTC over sports-event contracts.

Gamma

gamma.app ↗

Gamma uses AI to generate presentations, docs, and web pages, positioning itself as a PowerPoint replacement. It raised a $68M Series B in Nov 2025 at a $2.1B valuation, hitting $100M+ ARR and 70M users with only ~50 employees — unusually capital-efficient.

Handshake

joinhandshake.com ↗

Handshake is a career network connecting students and job seekers with 1,600+ institutions and 1M+ employers, having grown from a college-recruiting tool into a broader 'career network for the AI economy'. Its January 2022 Series F ($200M at a $3.5B valuation) came alongside strong reported revenue growth (Sacra estimates ~$1.1B annualized in 2026), though the valuation multiple still needs to be earned out.

Helsing

helsing.ai ↗

German defense-AI company building AI decision software for fighter jets, drones, and submarines, with customers including Ukraine's military, the German Bundeswehr, and Saab. Valuation jumped from a €5B Series C (2024) to an $18B Series E (2026), roughly 3.5x in two years, making it Europe's flagship defense-tech story — though it remains heavily dependent on government procurement and geopolitical tailwinds.

Exa

exa.ai ↗

Exa builds a search engine purpose-built for AI agents, with a search API and the high-compute Websets product as its core offerings. Valuation roughly tripled in about eight months, from $700M (Series B, Sep 2025) to $2.2B (Series C, May 2026) — fast growth, but the premium will need revenue to back it up.

Genspark

genspark.ai ↗

Genspark builds an 'agentic workspace' that chains multiple AI models and tools to autonomously execute complex tasks from a single prompt. Valuation jumped from $1.6B in March 2026 to $2.6B by June, with $645M raised to date — the growth curve is the headline, but it also means expectations (and the next round's bar) are now very high.

Mercor

mercor.com ↗

Mercor started as AI-driven recruiting/interviewing but has pivoted its core revenue toward supplying skilled human labelers and training data to frontier AI labs. Valuation rocketed from $250M (2024) to $2B (Feb 2025) to $10B (Oct 2025), with reported run-rate in the $450M-$1B range. All three founders are 21-year-old Thiel Fellows; the model is essentially a labor-data brokerage, concentrating risk on a handful of AI-lab customers.

n8n

n8n.io ↗

n8n is an open-source/fair-code workflow automation platform combining visual orchestration with AI agent capabilities. ARR grew 5x in a year, and valuation jumped to $2.5B post at the October 2025 $180M Series C (from the March 2025 Series B), with NVIDIA's NVentures joining as an investor — a clear signal of AI-automation momentum.

Notion

notion.com ↗

Notion is an all-in-one workspace combining docs, databases, and AI features for individuals and teams. ARR reportedly hit ~$600M in 2025 (up from ~$300M in 2024), and a January 2026 employee tender offer valued the company at $11B — growth funded organically rather than through a fresh venture round since 2021.

OpenEvidence

openevidence.com ↗

AI clinical copilot for physicians, dubbed the 'ChatGPT for doctors'; nearly 30% of US doctors reportedly use it. Valuation rocketed from $1B to $12B within about a year, with back-to-back rounds just months apart — striking adoption but a stretched valuation.

Legora

legora.com ↗

Legora builds a collaborative AI platform for law firms; valuation tripled from $1.8B to $5.55B in about five months while headcount grew from 40 to 400 in a year, serving 800+ law firms across 50+ markets. Growth is extraordinary but the pace of valuation increases is aggressive, and a co-founder has already departed — worth watching team stability and retention.

Lovable

lovable.dev ↗

Lovable is a Swedish "vibe coding" startup that lets users build full apps via natural-language prompts. Valuation roughly tripled from $1.8B (July 2025) to $6.6B (December 2025) within five months, tracking ARR growth from ~$100M to $200M over the same period.